Category Archives: controlled

A few weeks ago Mike Stone of CNCMogul.com visited the Milwaukee Makerspace.

Mike donated one of his machines to the space for testing and feedback as well as to use for the membership. It should also be mentioned that Mike is local and has his shop and distribution in Wales, Wisconsin.

Joe Rodriguez built one machine and I also put one together at our shop at home. So here are some thoughts on the process as well as some pictures. It isn’t a review as these machines haven’t really been put to the test as of yet. Time will tell.

The CNC Mogul is a general purpose 3 axis CNC kit that is relatively easy to put together and can be used for anything that you like. I’ll be using ours for routing and Joe wants to make a CNC plasma cutter with the one in the space. The basic kit is affordable and it uses the Makerslide as it’s building blocks. The stepper motors are run with a rack and pinion setup on aluminum tracks and gearing as well.

The controller is a Chinese Tb6560 Stepper Motor Driver Controller that is controlled via parallel port.

The power supply is a 24V 14.6 AMP 350W Max Power Supply.

The whole kit can be ordered online from 2ft X 3ft up to 4ft X 8ft. Custom dimensions are also available.

So here is the kit before assembly. This is a 3ft x 3ft kit that I will be building and using with a router.

This is the kit right before opening.

Inside the kit there are a bunch of baggies with tons of little parts. You can look at the manual here

I’m assembling the quad rail kit. Once I start pulling things out of the box there is an amazing array of parts that explodes out of it. Fortunately each bag and part are well marked.

Everything that you need to build your own CNC controlled machine.

Everything is labeled really well.

Everything is labeled really well.

The kit took approximately 3+ hours to put together. The documentation in the manual is hit or miss. The pictures are extremely good and really help in putting this together. The accompanying text is also great for the first 1/3 of the manual and then you’re left to interpret pictures from there. There are a few questions that came up while building this but fortunately I was able to figure it out.

Little by little the parts are being built.

After the gantry gets built and all of the wires are connected it’s time to test. CNC Mogul recommends using Mach 3 for your machine control. And even has a few pointers on how to setup Mach 3 on their site.

I decided to go with LinuxCNC because it’s open source, I’m comfortable with Linux and it’s low cost (free). I loaded it up on a spare computer and after running through the instructions I was able to control the stepper motors on the Mogul.

What I had difficulty with is that the CNC Mogul uses an “A” axis and “Y” axis slaved together. LinuxCNC can do that but you can NOT test for that in the setting up process. You essentially tell the “A” axis to use the same step and direction pulses as the “Y” axis. I also inverted the “A” axis so they would turn the same direction when they are facing each other.

One of the other difficulties I had was figuring out the leadscrew pitch to enter into LinuxCNC. After some experimentation 1.27 inches per revolution seems about right but some more testing is needed.

Once you’re finished building the whole thing you need to mount it to something. I picked up a Craigslist find and the Mogul fit perfectly.

In an effort to make the lighting control system more user-friendly, the original board-mounted switches have been replaced with a laser-cut zone map! Instead of looking up which zone number corresponds to a particular bank of lights, each location is now identified by a green LED pushbutton. You can read more about the lighting control system and how it’s been evolving on our wiki: http://wiki.milwaukeemakerspace.org/projects/mmlc

Whew. This project was a D-O-O-O-ZY! We needed to enclose our giant industrial arm so he can’t run away and join the robot circus…

Well…maybe not for THAT reason, but when we start cutting stuff with this robot, we need to keep spectators out of his reach and make sure that if a cutting bit does break, it doesn’t go flying out into the shop and maim someone.

This entire project was the work of several people and really shows why the Milwaukee Makerspace is a great place to build stuff/hang out with friends/play with power tools, etc…

———————————————————————————

Step 1: Design it! I used Solidworks and modeled each and every piece of wood that went into this project.

Step 2: get the wood! We made multiple trips to Home Depot, which thankfully is only 5 minutes away and we had great weather during the whole building process. I love having a truck! Fortune also shined upon me, as we had a new member join up right before I started this project, Jake R., and his help in building the wall was immeasurable.

Step 3: Bolt the wood to the floor so we know where to put the wall, and then build some framing!

Step 4: Put in the windows, drywall paneling and metal wainscoting. We were very lucky to get seven pieces of slightly-smoked Lexan from one of our members, Jason H. We also cut small holes in the ceiling tiles and ran 4 braces up to the metal ceiling trusses above. This enclosure is ROCK-solid stable! Thanks to Tony W. and Jim R. for helping with that!

When I went to Home Depot, I thought my truck could handle a 48″x 120″ sheet of drywall. Not so much… one of their employees helped me split 10 sheets of drywall in half, in the parking lot…so I would later find out that I did not have drywall tall enough for the wall corner. Hence the need for more “framing” so I could use smaller pieces.

The large cabinet that powers the robot arm is right next to the enclosure; I placed it outside to keep it away from foam & wood shavings. However, we will need to have the programming pendant next to the machine every now and then….hence the need for 2 small pass-thru doors next to the cabinet.

I used doweling to help hold the door frame components together…..probably not needed, but it ensures a STRONG door!

Again, hooooray for the Makerspace and all its tools! We have several LONG pipe clamps that came in VERY handy for gluing the door frame pieces together.

Here’s the outside of the enclosure. The big metal control cabinet will go right here, hence the framed “mouse hole” in the lower right corner so we can pass the cables through from the cabinet to the robot arm.

The same area viewed from inside the enclosure.

Here’s the ginormous sliding door. It’s mounted on a barn-door track-rail and supported on the bottom by two custom-made wheel brackets.

Here’s how I made the wheel brackets. I got two lawnmower-style wheels and bearings from Tom G., then Tom K. enlarged the center holes on the wheels on his Bridgeport mill so I could use bearings for smoother action.

I figured on four carriage bolts for a super-strong connection to the door frame.

This is the track and wheel bogies that hold the sliding door to the wall.

Bolting the brackets onto the door was “fun”…I forgot that the very bottom of the door framing is two horizontal pieces, so the very bottom bolt had to go. ‘DOH!

Here’s the final, assembled view. You can see the robot’s control cabinet in the lower right corner.

Now that the fabrication is complete, we’re working on decorative ideas for all that blank-looking drywall.

Whenever I look at this finished project it feels like to took several months to get it up, even though construction only lasted about 2-1/2 weeks.

Hi, I’m David and this is my first post on the Milwaukee Makerspace site. I’m a video producer by trade, so you’ll be soon seeing some videos from some of my projects, however if you’re on the site you might have already seen some of my work. In late March I put together some videos of the Makers talking about what they make and what they think the Milwaukee Makerspace is.
Anyway, I didn’t even know what a Makerspace was myself till my friend Matt wrote me an e-mail and said, “If you want to walk the walk, come down to the Milwaukee Makerspace.” Needless to say I had no idea what that meant, but as soon as I stepped foot in our beautiful space with the warm welcoming logo above the hangar, I figured it out pretty quickly.
I have never done any robotics or electronics in my life, but seeing what the makers was up to inspired me. I picked up a soldering iron and started small. I’m the kind of Maker that works their way up to the big projects. Initially my ideas for projects mostly relate to my profession of video production. I would like to make a low to the ground camera platform, for wide angle shots, and a flying rig for some limited ariels. One thing at a time though, first I have to make something that works.

Introducing… JunkBot 1.0!!!

JunkBot 1.0 is my first attempt at what I want for a ground based camera platform. It sorta kinda does everything i want it to, but isn’t very robust. It’s functions are:

– Moves forward, back, turns using tank style steering
– Has a pan tilt camera mount
– Can wirelessly transmit video from the bot to a ground station
– Is controlled via a standard RC controller
– Falls apart slowly after about 15 feet of travel

My build process was:

1. Find plastic platform and half project box at the Makerspace “Hack Rack”
2. Get 2 continuous rotation servos & wheels. (Parallax servos sold at Adafruit)
3. Get an RC controller I am happy with (Futaba 7C 2.4ghz)
4. Get 2 servos and mounts for the pan tilt functions of the camera mount
5. Get 900mhz wireless video transmitter (RangeVideo)
6. Make front tire out of foam and a coat hanger
7. Strapped it all together with Velcro (TM).

Search

Search for:

Join us for The Greatest Show (& Tell) on Earth at Wisconsin State Faire Park September 24th & 25th, 2016. Admission is free. A joint presentation by Milwaukee Makerspace and the Betty Brinn Children's Museum.

Connect with Milwaukee Makerspace

Join our public mailing list to talk with Milwaukee Makers about projects, techniques and more.